MEEKER | Water has always been a priority in the Josephine Basin — the broad valley southwest of Meeker named for the draw where Josephine Meeker and the women of the White River settlement were held captive after the 1879 uprising. The basin depends on rainfall and spring runoff, both of which have been in short supply for decades.
When Kathleen Kelley’s father, Joe Sullivan, started farming the property in the late 1940s, finding ways to capture and store water — first for dryland wheat, later for cattle — became a lifelong project. With early USDA assistance, and later on their own, the family built roughly 30 dams and Z-dikes across the approximately 2,000-acre ranch.
“It was always a dream of my dad — ‘Wow, look at all the water we could collect if we had a dam there,’” Kelley said. She described building Z-dikes, simple earth-and-stone structures that slow and redirect runoff, and earthen dams in the gulches that cut through the property. Some held water, others never did. “We built those years and years ago, and they never held water. Ever. We were always disappointed. But part of that was the changing climate. It got so terribly dry we had no runoff, and we haven’t had spring runoff here for 20-plus years. This gulch would sometimes run bank to bank in the spring, and we haven’t seen that in decades.”
Then came 2025 — hotter and drier than the “new normal,” fueling the largest fires in county history. Unpredictable fire behavior forced evacuations and burned several original homesteads on the ranch to barely recognizable rubble.
If not for the vigilance of local fire crews, the Kelley home — built with fire mitigation in mind after a 1996 wildfire — likely would have been lost. Scorch marks on porch beams, a melted electrical box, and heat-cracked windows tell the story of how close it came.
And then the rains arrived. Those old dams became critical infrastructure overnight.
“This year they’ve been lifesavers — not because they just caught water. They slowed the flow, but they caught sediment coming off the Little Hills, and that became huge,” Kelley said.
“There’s five [dams] on the main stem. In the first big rain, the upper dams filled and trickled into the next. The next filled, trickled to the next. It wasn’t until the third or fourth rain that the lowest dam even got water in it. And that one never went over the spillway.”
Kelley recalled checking on horses during one of the post-fire storms and watching the gulch come alive.
“The rain was hammering the Little Hills,” she said. “I stood on the back porch and watched it swell on the south side of the ranch, watched it spread out and then zone in and start pouring down the gulch. My hearing is awful, and I could still hear it roaring. The volume of water was unreal.”
When she tried to leave, worried she might be trapped, she found county Road and Bridge crews battling floodwater at Sheep Creek off Highway 13.
“They were down there with loaders, digging debris out of the culverts near the Grant house — the old Jim Wilson place, for those in my generation — and water was coming right over the road,” she said. “I was scared for those workers. Floodwater carrying debris will lift even the heaviest equipment and move it. Those county workers were risking their lives to clear it. They got it open, and I got through. For some, everything ended when the fire stopped. For those guys, it’s been continuous.”
Through a family friend, Kelley connected with Justin Stover of River Science (parent organization of River Watch), who happened to be in the area. Within 24 hours of visiting the ranch, he sent a list of short-term, long-term, experimental and tertiary projects: repairing existing structures and roads, using the newly deposited soil and burned material to build additional water-holding features, planting indigenous-use plant communities, and using fencing to redirect livestock and wildlife to improve drainage and regrowth.
The Josephine Basin wasn’t opened to homesteading until 1918. Before that, overgrazing by large cattle outfits in the 1880s resulted in the deep gullies still visible from Highway 13. Homesteaders like the Finches, Fords, Walters, Randalls, DeVotos, Shepherds, and the Cassidys grew dryland wheat here, as the Sullivans did for many years. Change has always been part of this landscape — sometimes from people, sometimes from nature — and those who live here have always faced the choice to stay or go in the face of change.
For Kelley, the way forward isn’t restoration. It’s transformation.
“We have to be resilient,” she said. “We have to do things differently than we ever have in the past.”
All that remains of one of the early homesteads is a pile of brick — made in Meeker — and rubble that fell where it stood as the Lee Fire ravaged the Josephine Basin.
In the center of the picture one can see the remnants of an old bridge on the Kelley property in the Josephine Basin. The bridge pilings are about 4-5 feet high. Flooding after the Lee Fire brought feet of ash and debris down the ravine from the Little Hills and wiped out the bridge decking of timber and earth.
